1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to data management systems and, in particular, to a system, method, and article of manufacture for providing data versioning support for data management systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern data processing systems have become increasingly complex. In particular, data processing systems have become distributed. Distributed data processing systems support and facilitate a collaborative work environment for users of the system, even though the users may be located in different geographic locations. The distributed data processing system may include hundreds of terminals and workstations distributed over geographically diverse locations. Such distributed systems provide a distribution of computing resources and an environment that supports the operational situations wherein many users can provide input data to the system.
As an example, a distributed database management system can include a database server to couple database queries from users located at various offices of an organization. A library server and one or more object servers may be used to store and access thousands of data items, including, for example, documents, graphic files, sound files, or other objects that are created, edited, approved, and viewed by a number of the system users.
A problem that exists for conventional database management systems is that providing support for versioning database data exponentially increases the amount of data stored by the database. In a traditional database management system versioning support, if any, decreases the performance of the system due to the complexity of the versioning systems and methods utilized in tracking the version of the data. Complexity is increased due to the version support system and methods creating additional tables and object types.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system of providing data versioning support without adversely impacting performance of the data management system while providing the greatest throughput to the most frequently requested data.
The present invention provides improved support for tracking the versioning of data.
The present invention also supports versioning of data that is compatible with version supported data and non-versioned data systems and methods, as well standard database management operations.